Name: Melisa Hilaire

Date: 1/29/2021
Cognitive Psychology

1) What is the difference between sensation and perception?

 Sensation is the bottom-up process by which our senses, like vision, hearing and
smell, receive and relay outside stimuli while perception is the top-down way our
brain organizes and interpret that information and put it into context.
2) What is the purpose of the signal Detection Theory? Give an example of sensory
adaptation and difference threshold. Apply Weber’s Law to when you are cooking and
adding salt to Chili.
 The purpose of the signal Detection Theory is to see how we make decisions, so
decision making, under conditions of uncertainty, so with uncertainty. An
example of sensory adaptation is when you hang meet up with your friend
wearing and expensive, strong scented perfume and the scent lingers in the air,
but after spending an hour with your friend you barely notice the scent. An
example of difference threshold is the minimum difference in weight for us to
perceive a change between two piles of sand.
When I am cooking and adding salt to chili the more salt, I see the perception that
the chili getting saltier. The actual change can be detected by tasting.
3) How do we know that humans have a big investment in visual processing?
 This investment in visual processing by t in vision is part of our “inheritance” as
primates, who have evolved to devote as much as 50% of their brains to visual
processing (Barton, 1998). The enormous investment underlies the human ability
to see the world.
4) What is visual agnosia? Describe the soldier mentioned on the first page of this chapter.
What type of agnosia did he have? Describe the other type. How does this apply to Oliver
Sacks?
 Visual agnosia is when there is damage to certain brain regions who are not blind
but are unable to recognize anything visually.
The soldier suffered brain damage resulting from accidental carbon monoxide
poisoning. He could recognize objects by their feel, smell, or sound, but he was
unable to distinguish a picture of a circle from that of a square or to recognize
faces or letters. On the other hand, he was able to discern light intensities and
colors and to tell in what direction an object was moving. Thus, his sensory
system was still able to register visual information, but the damage to his brain
resulted in a loss of the ability to transform visual information into perceptual
experience.
The solider suffered from apperceptive agnosia. The other type of agnosia is
associative agnosia which is when persons can recognize simple shapes and can
successfully copy drawings, even of complex objects. However, they are unable
to recognize the complex objects. This applies to Oliver Sacks because he cannot
Name: Melisa Hilaire
Date: 1/29/2021
Cognitive Psychology
recognize his own face in the mirror or his friends’ face (complex) but he can
recognize his coffee cup (not complex)

5) What are the steps (parts of the EYE) that play a role in EARLY visual processing? List
them in order and describe their function. Start with PUPIL and end with RETINA
(including photoreceptor cells)
 The steps (parts of the EYE) that play a role in EARLY visual processing are:
- The pupil allows light to enter.
- Light passes through the lens and the vitreous humor and falls on the retina
at the back of the eye.
- Light is scattered slightly in passing through the vitreous humor, so the
image that falls on the back of the retina is not perfectly sharp.
- The retina contains the photoreceptor cells, which are made up of light-
sensitive molecules that undergo structural changes when exposed to light.

6) Describe the difference between rods and cones. On a physiological level, why are cones
responsible for visual acuity?
 Rods and cones are two distinct types of photoreceptors in the eye. Cones are
involved in color vision and produce high resolution and acuity. Rods are
principally responsible for the less acute, black-and-white vision we experience at
night. On a physiological level, cones are responsible for visual acuity because
they are concentrated in a small area of the retina called the fovea which enables
us to take full advantage of the high resolution of the cones in perceiving the
object. Foveal vision detects fine details, whereas the rest of the visual field—the
periphery—detects more global information, including movement.
7) What the steps (BRAIN areas) that are responsible for LATE visual processing.  List
them in order and describe their function. Start with BIPOLAR CELLS and end with
VISUAL ASSOCIATION CORTEX.
 The steps (BRAIN areas) that are responsible for LATE visual processing are:
- Bipolar cells: The receptor cells synapse onto bipolar cells and these onto
ganglion cells, whose axons leave the eye and form the optic nerve, which
goes to the brain.
- Each ganglion cell encodes information from a small region of the retina
called the cell’s receptive field.
- The axons of all the ganglions cells weave together to create your second
cranial nerve. Which leave the back of the eyeball to carry impulses up to the
thalamus and then to the brain visual cortex. The optic nerves from both
eyes meet at the optic chiasma, where the nerves from the inside of the retina
(the side nearest the nose) cross over and go to the opposite side of the brain.
Name: Melisa Hilaire
Date: 1/29/2021
Cognitive Psychology
The nerves from the outside of the retina continue to the same side of the
brain as the eye. This means that the right halves of both eyes are connected to
the right hemisphere.

8) Why are ganglion on-off cells? What does this mean?

 Ganglions are on-off cells because Ganglion cells show diverse responses to step
changes of light. Generally, responses can be divided into on (activated by
increases of light intensity), off (activated by decreases of light intensity), and on–
off (activated by both increases and decreases of light intensity). The ganglion
cells expressing these responses are accordingly termed ON cells, OFF cells, and
on–off cells. 
9) What did Hubel and Wiesel (1962) study? They suggest that no single on-off or off-on
cell is sufficient to elicit a response from a detector cell; instead, the detector cell
responds to patterns of input from the on-off and off-on cells. What does this mean?
 In Hubel and Wiesel study they investigated where in the vision pathway the
abnormality of vision cells came from. They sought to know whether the
abnormality was a cortical or a geniculate abnormality, as that information would
reveal how the vision pathway works. In their study of the primary visual cortex
in the cat, found that visual cortical cells respond in a more complex manner than
ganglion cells and cells in the lateral geniculate nucleus.
 It means that you cannot get a response from detector cell using only the off-on or
on-off cell. You will get a response if there is a pattern of input from both the on-
off and off-on cells. They respond positively to light in the center and negatively
to light at the periphery, or vice versa. Thus, a bar with a positive center will
respond most if there is a bar of light just covering its center.
10) What kind of information does the visual system extract from the visual signal?
 The visual system extracts rich representation of line orientation, size, and width,
information from the visual signal. Livingstone and Hubel (1988) proposed that
the visual system processes these various dimensions (form, color, and
movement) separately.